Angel Souls and Devil Hearts (25 page)

Through it all, Meaghan could not forget the words of Lord Alhazred:
The Suffering are always here, no matter where else they may be
. She didn’t truly understand it, and though she
no longer trusted him, Lazarus claimed he did not know what it meant. Eventually, Meaghan decided it might be better if she remained ignorant.

Since Alex had died, they had not been attacked at all. Not by demon-lords, or their hellish slaves. They had been completely unmolested, and the more Meaghan thought about it, the more she
wondered if they weren’t being manipulated the entire time. Days, weeks and months had passed as they moved from one pit of Hell to the next, without a trace of Peter. All of the
demons—and it seemed to her they had become progressively uglier—knew exactly what they were talking about, but couldn’t tell them where they might find Octavian.

Meaghan had to think, eventually, that they were being led on a wild goose chase. She also became very concerned about the time they had been gone. Lazarus had told her that time would move much
more quickly here, but how much? They had been in Hell for months. Was the battle all over in their world? Had Mulkerrin been victorious? Had their dimension become nothing more than a playground
for Hell’s work-beasts, freed from their masters?

On this day, which seemed like every other, she was at her wit’s end. They were standing in the center of a cavern in which jackal-like creatures raped the Suffering over and over in every
orifice, splashing some kind of sulphuric ejaculate all over the damned things, all over the stone floor its acid eating through flesh and bone and stone.

“I wish I could do more for you,” the demon-lord said, sitting back in its stone chair and overseeing the terrors visited upon the damned in its care. This latest lord was almost
blue and seemed made of chalk. Its belly was bloated and for the most part hid the bony phallus between its legs, though the thing’s testicles were the size of melons and hung low enough in
their sack to rest comfortably on the ground. On its head was a crown of penises, woven with flesh ropes unmistakably made of women’s labia. Its jaws were long and filled with suckers like
those of an octopus. Apparently, it had no eyes.

“So do we,” Lazarus said, obviously wanting to leave as much as Meaghan did.

“I can send you on to—” the thing began. but Meaghan couldn’t take it anymore. Alex was dead; she wouldn’t let her world die too.

“What’s your name?” she asked the thing, and it turned its head toward her, mouth open. She wondered if it would try to attack her, but then realized the thing didn’t
have a nose, that the suckers in its mouth were for breathing, for smelling, among other things.

“My . . . name?” it asked.

“Yes, your name. What is your name? I wouldn’t have thought this a difficult question.”

Lazarus whipped his head around to stare at her, jaw agape, thinking she had lost her mind. And perhaps she had.

Then, what looked like fleshy folds of skin on the demon’s huge testicles parted, revealing, finally, the thing’s eyes. Meaghan wanted to vomit, but she wouldn’t show her
disgust, or fear.

“So you
can
see,” she snapped. “What I want to know is if you can hear.”

Her words had the desired effect. The demon had expected her to be silenced by the opening of its eyes, and was sorely disappointed and quite angry. It rose to its feet and took a step toward
them, and Meaghan thought she saw the suckers inside its mouth elongate just slightly, and when it spoke now, in anger, it had something of a lisp.

“I am Pa-Bil-Ssssag!” it yelled. “How dare you ssspeak to me in sssuch a manner?”

Before it could continue, Meaghan interrupted again.

“How dare I?” she shouted back. “Simple. I dare because I am an agent of the Stranger. We come here on the Stranger’s mission, not our own, and we have been played for
fools for far too long!

“Now, Pa-Bil-Sag, if your name is as you claim, then I know you, I know your power, I know your name and I know the spell of binding, taught to me by the Stranger,” she lied.
“I can think of several places to relocate you that you would not enjoy!”

Pa-Bil-Sag merely stared at her then, and Meaghan found it disconcerting to be looking down at its testicles when the danger of its gaping jaws was much higher and doser to her. But she would
not be the first to look away. This was a staring contest, like the ones she had had with her childhood friends, but this one was for much higher stakes.

Pa-Bil-Sag’s eyes closed, and it sat down. Meaghan heard an audible sigh from Lazarus behind her, but she resisted an urge to step back, to uncross her arms, to look away.

“You are strong, female,” it said. “Though perhaps not as strong as you would like me to believe. We owe the Stranger no allegiance, only courtesy, and my courtesy is
hard-pressed with you. Still, I have no wish to confront your master again, and this charade was purely for the amusement of my brother, not myself. As such, I see no reason to perpetuate
it.”

Meaghan saw Lazarus move closer, stunned to realize that they were about to receive answers, but she listened carefully, searching for the deception she had found in all demon-lords’
speech.

“This Mulkerrin and the one you seek are and have been the playthings of my brother, who found them when they first arrived here,” he said. “I am certain they have endured
extraordinary suffering. I am also certain that my brother will be very pleased to add to his collection.”

“What is your brother’s name?” Lazarus asked.

“Not that it will help you any,” Pa-Bil-Sag said and grinned, tentacles reaching out from inside its mouth, sucking at air, latching on to each other and to the demon’s face.
“My brother isss Beelzebub, but he will not be concerned with your sssmall magicksss. Beelzebub is sssecond in power only to the First Fallen and will never allow an alleviation of
sssuffering for one of his toysss.”

“And where is the lair of this brother of yours?” Meaghan asked, still arrogant on the surface, but filled with sadness and dread.

“Outssside.”

“And how do we get there?”

And now the demon laughed, a huge, bellowing roar. On its crown, though apparently not connected to it in any way, the penises seemed to grow erect, and Meaghan finally had to look away. A
mistake, she knew, but it couldn’t be helped.

“A bargain,” the demon-lord said, stifling its laughter. “I will transssport you there, to the outssside, and you mussst only walk toward the fire to find my brother’sss
land. For this ssservice, you will do one thing for me.”

“And what might that be?” Lazarus asked, waiting for the catch.

“Tell him I sssent you,” Pa-Bil-Sag said and chuckled down in some phlegm-filled throat. “Tell him I sssent you . . . as a gift.”

Salzburg, Austria, European Union.
Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 7:19
A.M.
:

It was madness.

Gloria Rodriguez floated out of the sky, H-K blazing. As they approached, her paratroopers unhitched, dropping the last fifteen or twenty feet to the ground, rolling over and blasting
Mulkerrin’s possessed “warriors” into as many pieces as they could. It was clear to them that the sorcerer was somehow controlling these people, but they would have to be listed
as “casualties” in the destruction of the city. The repercussions of those civilian deaths couldn’t be taken into consideration here. A war was on.

Many of the paratroopers didn’t make it to the ground alive, savaged in the air by flying things, chutes destroyed, bellies torn open. But most of them did make it, and some of those who
did had flamethrowers. Fire was their most effective weapon, and getting it inside the fortress was key. As demons and weird, mind-controlled soldiers burned, the intensity of the green glow
surrounding the sorcerer at the center of the fortress’s courtyard seemed to dim just for a moment. One of Gloria’s men fired on Mulkerrin, but the bullets seemed to pass right through,
appearing on the other side to scatter among the others, wounding one shadow, who shook it off and kept going.

“Shadows!” she shouted. “The door! Let’s go!”

And then they were around her, in arrow formation, as they headed for the huge door to the fortress. Here she was, in the middle of the battle, surrounded by vampires, and all Gloria could think
of was the giant gate in the original
King Kong
. She forced the thought back and spun to fire at a figure rushing her from behind. A torrent of bullets cut across the body, but even before
it hit the ground she knew she’d made a mistake.

Gloria Rodriguez had killed one of her own men.

“Carlos!” she shouted, but even as she considered kneeling at his side, she sensed something different about the battle in the courtyard.

Looking up, Gloria was stunned to see that, even though most of Mulkerrin’s civilian warriors had been destroyed, and the main portal in the courtyard was being continuously blanketed with
fire, torching everything that came through, they were not winning. In fact, they were losing.

Losing, because her troops were killing one another. She watched as Maria Santos turned and blasted her blowtorch in the faces of two of her fellow soldiers, her friends. Gloria’s unit
began firing at one another, bodies falling rapidly.

“What the hell?” she began to say, and then saw the movement out of the corner of her eye, where the body of Carlos, the man she’d killed, lay. From his still form, a sickly
yellow cloud rose and floated toward her. A quick glance showed her that others of these clouds flitted among the soldiers in the courtyard, and she watched one disappear into one of her
paratroopers, who pulled out a knife and leapt on his nearest comrade.

“God, no,” she whispered to herself, and then heard a ghastly, sickening chuckle.

Mulkerrin, whose eyes had been closed as he wove his spells, protected from the fighting around him, had finally opened them, and was looking right at her. Rodriguez turned to run, and then
realized she couldn’t. Mulkerrin had to be stopped or all human troops would be useless.

“Go!” she shouted at the contingent of shadows around her. “Help your people get those doors open, now!”

Gloria turned back toward the sorcerer, and the ghost, or whatever it was, had come much nearer. She moved as fast as she could, and faster, obviously, than that yellow, evil mist. She dodged
right past the thing, firing at Maria as she went. Thirty-five feet separated her from Mulkerrin, and she closed that gap in seconds. Gloria slung her H-K over her shoulder, knowing bullets would
do no good, and pulled her knife from its hip sheath. Steel flashed in sunlight even as she passed through, into the green glow surrounding the former priest.

Reflexively she had taken a breath, and without reason she held it, though it tasted of death, the burning of stinking monsters and a bitter poison she imagined came from those tainted, ghostly
things. None of that worried Gloria, but something inside her warned against inhaling whatever was causing the glow around the sorcerer. And Mulkerrin just stood there, arms wide, head hanging as
if in supplication. He looked up at her, his eyelids drooping, his stare either tired or seductive. The smile remained on his lips as he spoke to her.

“Welcome, little girl,” he said, and even as Gloria thrust the knife toward his belly . . .

. . . she stopped. Or something stopped her, still, paralyzed where she stood. The mad being who had once been Liam Mulkerrin reached out and passed a hand through her black hair, and Gloria
opened her mouth and breathed in. The smell was awful, rotten, dying, and she wanted to throw up but could not command the muscles in her stomach to do so.

“Kneel before me,” Mulkerrin said, his smile turning into a leer even as the weight of his words forced her to her knees, “and I will give you your communion.”

All around the fortress, the United Nations security force was fighting on two fronts. While they tried to get over the walls of the fortress, past the demons that continued to
emerge from the portals, only to be destroyed but often at the cost of lives, they also had to guard their own backs against those demons that had come up into the city and were now rampaging
there, hunting down the many humans still left cowering in basements and hiding under beds. Many of the demons also attacked the troops from behind and prevented a good portion of the forces from
reaching the fortress at all.

Commander Gruber’s unit, having come down the river and into Mozartplatz, had been almost completely slaughtered, and even the commander himself had been killed. The majority of the
shadows with Gruber had also died, though several had disappeared at the same time that Hannibal had abandoned Commander Jimenez’s strike team, a couple hours earlier. In fact, each unit lost
a handful of shadows at that time, and there was no trace of Hannibal or the other AWOL shadows. They were, simply, gone.

The other commanders—Locke, Surro and Thomas—all continued their attacks, and the more than one hundred fifty shadows still in action had finally been moved close enough to diminish
the danger from the portals, so that the troops could concentrate on the walls themselves.

Finally, it seemed to UNSF Commander Roberto Jimenez, they were getting somewhere.

Roberto and his team were outside the gate. Including Rolf, there were thirty-five shadows with Jimenez, and though they could easily have flown over, they had to open the gate if the rest of
the forces were to enter. Jimenez had attempted to blow the gate to splinters using a pair of CAMELs, easy-launch, hand-held missiles with computer-aided targeting to find the weakest structural
point. They exploded before ever reaching the door. In fact, any artillery used on the gate was rebuffed, and even the strength of as many shadows as could line up in front of the gate
couldn’t budge it.

Though nervous, even frightened at first, Jimenez’s men had warmed to the shadows immediately. Handpicked by Rolf Sechs, for the most part they were top-notch soldiers and engendered an
easy camaraderie with their human counterparts. All of them, that is, except for Jimenez himself. Though he had a grudging respect for Sechs, he was glad to have the cold, sharp silver of his
dagger hidden safely away in his clothing.